Ancient Evil

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In general terms, this trope is about some sort of evil force or being that has been around for an extreme length of time - hundreds or thousands of years at the minimum, and potentially predates humanity - or even life/earth/the universe itself.

Alternatively, it can be about a particular ancient civilization that was (or still is) deeply evil.

Some sort of utterly ancient "force of evil", that is as old as the earth, and maybe as old as or older than the universe, and possibly universal in influence. Either Eldritch Abomination, God of Evil, or Satan (or equivalent). It is effectively the source of much or all evil among humans, either by tempting or leading them astray, or through some sort of mental corruption.

A pre-human sapient species. The earth belonged to them once, and they hate us for usurping it. Maybe they want it back, or perhaps just to harm us out of jealousy. Often they are forced by violent human ancestors figuratively or literally underground, earning them the name Ultraterrestrials.

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An ancient (and long-extinct) civilization. Possibly caused its own extinction due to its evil (or the evil it unleashed). Typically had a society based on demon summoning, worship of dark gods, etc. May be presented as being evil because it was so ancient. By the time the main storyline goes, this civilization is mostly being talked over, and either being Greater-Scope Villain or the source of the current villain's evil.

Related to the above, an ancient and still existing civilization. Again, may be presented as being evil because it is so old — either because it is a survivor from a time when every civilization was evil, or because it has been corrupted over time (a form of Immortality Immorality as applied to cultures). May have a hand on an Ancient Conspiracy and maintains a Masquerade, but they may sometimes go openly.

Examples

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Anime and Manga

Naruto. The original Tailed Beast, the Juubi (Ten-Tails) was originally a benign, very old and powerful World Tree who only wants to remain be until Princess Kaguya ate one of its fruits, becoming the first human with the power of chakra, in order to stop the neverending war of humans. Said tree was not amused and turned into Ten-Tails, terrorizing all humans until Kaguya's son, the Sage of the Six Paths, sealed him within his body, and later, split off Juubi's power into 9 creatures (who became the 9 Tailed Beasts) and created the moon to bury his body out of Earth. In the current timeline he's successfully revived by efforts of the group Akatsuki and gets sealed in its leader Tobi, gaining its tremendous power. Or, at least, that's what everyone thought it was. In reality, the World Tree was ultimately just that — a tree. The Ten-Tails came about when Kaguya became jealous of the power her sons inherited from her and merged with the tree to become the demon of legend and take it back, subsequently being sealed in the process, but not before she created Black Zetsu, who spent the next several thousands of years engineering the history of shinobi in order to revive her and erasing nearly all traces of her existence and records of her rule in order to prevent anyone from trying to stop her unsealing. So their is an ancient evil at work — just not the one everyone thought it was.

Parodied in Ranma ½ with Happosai, whose introduction in the manga makes him seem like some horrible, ancient evil that's been sealed away for centuries. He, of course, turns out to be just a Dirty Old Man that Genma and Soun locked up several decades earlier.

In Kill la Kill, the Original Life Fiber is a massive parasitic organism that actually predates human life.

The Pillar Men from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure are powerful vampiric beings that have lived for thousands of years and feed on humans by absorbing them within their bodies. They're strong, incredibly intelligent, Immune to Bullets and can also shift their bodies at will, their only weaknesses are sunlight and Hamon (which harnesses the power of sunlight itself), and even then the Hamon has to be powerful enough to pierce through their thick skins. They're called 'Pillar Men' because of their preferred method of hybernating, it being turning into a stone-like material and sticking to a pillar deep underground. They're also the last remaining members of an ancient humanoid species that lived in South America. Kars, the leader, betrayed them all thosuands of years prior of Part 2 and turned himself into a Pillar Man, and proceeded to slaughter his entire species.

Comic Books

Merd the Oppressor from the Judge Dredd comic books seemed to have been eaten by the giant magical toad Sagbelly, from which Judge Dredd extracted some oracle spice. However, Merd's ghost appeared briefly with a warning: "It takes ten thousand years to learn to use oracle spice correctly, and even then it is dangerous. Look what happened to me." Among Merd's horrors was culling villagers to feed Sagbelly.

In Runaways, the Gibborim date back to the time of the Book of Genesis.

Played with in Seven Soldiers of Victory with the Sheeda; while they've been plundering the Earth for hundreds of thousands of years, they are actually time-travelers from one million years into our future.

Fan Works

This trope has become so overused in The Legend of Spyro fanworks that it's often the source of major Snark Bait within the fandom. 'New ancient evil' has pretty much become a major flag that the fic falls into "Post Dawn of the Dragon template", and is often associated with Sturgeon's Law fics in the fandom. Despite this though, this trope just refuses to die, with stories that enclude "Spyro and Cynder have to fight a new ancient evil" still clogging the archive to this day.

Child of the Storm has a few: Gravemoss, who's about fifteen hundred years old, the Darkhold which is indescribably ancient, its author, whose vintage is somewhere in the billions and there is mention of the Dark Elves (though they are believed to be largely extinct).

The Disir are in the region of ten thousand years old.

Thanos is also implied to have been around for thousands of years.

Selene is noted as having already been old when Atlantis fell some 17,000 years ago.

Surtur, the original Dark Phoenix, rampaged across the universe roughly a million years ago, and has been sealed away ever since. An Elder Wyrm which served him and has been slumbering since his defeat emerges during the First Task of the Triwizard Tournament.

The Seventh Doctor's tendency to fight these is parodied in the This Time Round story "Like Water For Adric", where the Doctor's companions complain that if he finds so much as a cockroach in the loo, he calls it 'Ancient Eeeevil!'. The Doctor protests that cockroaches are ancient.

The New Adventures of Invader Zim has Norlock, the vampire who allies with Zim. An exact age is never given, but he claims to have known Caligula, and states at one point that when he was human he built pyramids for a living.

Film  Animated

The Loc-Nar from Ivan Reitman's Heavy Metal describes itself as "the sum of all evil. My influence spans all times, all dimensions, all galaxies." Although it is ultimately destroyed in the film's climax, the closing narration implies that a new Taarakian is born to protect the universe; presumably, evil will return and coalesce into another Artifact of Doom.

Kai from Kung Fu Panda 3, who was sealed in the Spirit Realm before the creation of kung fu itself, only breaking out five hundred years later. Being the Ancient Evil actually kind of pisses him off, since it means that nobody knows who he is anymore.

Film  Live Action

The Dark Elves, and especially their leader Malekith, in Thor: The Dark World have existed since before the creation of the universe and aimed to destroy all worlds to bring back everything to the state of the dark void.

Godzilla and Gamera are both ancient monsters who are awoken one day and go on a rampage. In some movies they are depicted as good, however. King Ghidorah, who played this role in the Showa era Godzilla films and reprised the role in the Rebirth of Mothra trilogy's final installment appears to be set to play this trope completely and terrifyingly straight in the 2019 film Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

An ancient Egyptian princess from The Awakening was so evil that her father, the Pharoah, had her Sealed Evil in a Can in an unmarked tomb, and erased almost all traces of her existence. The evil princess takes possession of an archaeologist's daughter once he opens the hidden tomb.

Snow White and the Huntsman: Queen Ravenna is an ancient sorcerer who has been keeping herself (and her brother Finn) alive and young by devouring other's lifeforce. As she reveals towards the end, she's lived at least twenty human lives (making her over 1400) and destroyed countless kingdoms.

The Enchantress in Suicide Squad (2016) is an over 6000-years old extra-dimensional entity revered as a goddess in South America before going in hibernation and waking in modern times to find out humans have forgotten her.

Steppenwolf (and by extension, his master Darkseid) in Justice League (2017) are possibly even more ancient than Enchantress, having tried to conquer Earth during The Time of Myths, but he was beaten back by a proto-Justice League made up of humans, Amazons, Atlanteans, Olympian Gods and Green Lanterns. For the next millenia, Steppenwolf would live in exile and wait for the right time to return to Earth and complete his conquest so he can regain his lost glory.

Literature

In Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates, an ancient Egyptian sorcerer who has held on long after the use of magic decayed into evil.

In The Belgariad, Big Bad Torak is so ancient that not only did he and his brothers precede the great disaster that split the known world into two continents, but he in fact caused the disaster.

The Humanx Commonwealth novel Bloodhype. The Vom is a giant ameoba-like creature that devours all life on whatever planet it's on. It's at least 500,000 years old (and probably much older).

H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos is basically made of this due to the prevalence of different flavors of Eldritch Abomination and Abusive Precursors. Mythos races [[Ultraterrestrials of terrestrial origin]] and the Serpent People can be hundreds of millions of years old (Deep Ones began worshipping Cthulhu 350 MYA during the Carboniferous, the first Serpent People civilization arose 275 MYA during the Permian, Chaugnar Faugn created the Miri Nigri 370 MYA...)

In the Dark Wing series, the Vuhls have been around since at least as far back as the days of Qu'u, a legendary Zor hero who lived thousands of years ago.

In Dragon's Winter the evil mage Ankoku was defeated and imprisoned in ancient times, but he sleeps until Tenjiro wakes him and enlists his help in destroying his brother, Karadur.

The Big Bad of Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is the Blight, an Eldritch Abomination implied to be a kind of sentient computer virus that is capable of running on both mechanical and organic platforms—i.e., any sentient creature. Humans inadvertently boot up an ancient database that has hosted the dormant Blight for at least a few tens of billions of years, and it immediately begins to spread out over the galaxy-wide computer network, infecting both computers and sentient creatures.

The Lord of the Rings. Melkor/Morgoth, Sauron, the Balrogs, Ungoliant, Saruman...just about all of the extremely evil and powerful beings in Middle-Earth were also thousands of years old, some of them dating back to the creation of the world.

The Un-man from Perelandra uses his nigh-eternal existence to make the young Queen of Venus believe he has wisdom outside of his knowledge (shared with his fellow Earthlings) on how to kill, corrupt, tempt, violate, and haunt innocents who have yet to hate the universe as much as he does.

Dean Koontz's Phantoms. The Big Bad is a gigantic amorphous creature that's older than humanity, and possibly as old as life on Earth.

The driving force behind the Second Apocalypse by R. Scott Bakker is the Consult, a group of powerful sorcerers and generals who allied with an Always Chaotic Evil race of Magitek-wielding aliens. Together, they're attempting to resurrect their Eldritch AbominationNo-God, Mog-Pharau. The Consult was responsible for the Apocalypse four thousand years before the events of the series, but by the present day, everyone except for the Mandate school of sorcerers is convinced that they no longer exist, if they ever existed at all. Interestingly Downplayed in the first trilogy, as they are mostly a Greater-Scope Villain only tangentially connected to the main plot of the Holy War, but played very straight in the second trilogy.

A Song of Ice and Fire: the Others. When the first of the First Men, eight thousand years ago, set foot on Westeros, the Others were already there, waiting for new victims. They might be even older than that, given that the Children of the Forest, another very ancient race, carried obsidian weapons that are their Kryptonite.

In The Wheel of Time, the Dark One is said to have been bound "at the moment of Creation"; taken literally, it predates the universe (but since it strictly speaking exists outside of time entirely, that's a somewhat wonky call to make). Its chief servants, the Forsaken, clock in at a "mere" three millennia and change, but still qualify as well.

Live-Action TV

Illyria, from Angel. Probably the rest of the Old Ones too, but he/she was the king.

The Master is one of the few vampires old enough to have totally lost all human features, making him several centuries old.

Glory. Nobody knows her real name because she predates the invention of written language.

The aptly named First Evil.

Doctor Who features this a lot, with the Doctor stopping the reemergence of evils on all levels of the scale. Plus, in the expanded canon of the novels and audio stories the ancient Gallifreyans were a race of monster-slayers who tamed the chaotic early universe.

"The Pandorica Opens" subverts this. Initially, the Doctor believes that the Pandorica houses some kind of ancient, unimaginably evil entity that his enemies intend to unleash on him and the rest of the universe. Turns out, the Pandorica is a cage  intended for him. It goes further when it's revealed that a lot of races regard the Doctor himself as an Ancient Evil.

"Resolution" involves an evil that was buried on Earth in the ninth century, and then gets loose 1200 years later.

Game of Thrones: The White Walkers have reawakened for the first time in 8,000 years. The first member of their race, who was turned into the Night King, was among the first human settlers on the continent.

The vast majority of demons. Ruby and Crowley are both from the 16th century, and it's implied that they're young by demon standards, as they're the only known demons young enough to remember having once been human.

The Archangels all predate humanity, and "The Man Who Would Be King" reveals they were there when the first land-dwelling vertebrates evolved. The S10 finale implies they predate the Universe itself. All other evil angels also predate humanity, though they are younger than the Universe.

War, Famine, and Pestilence are implied to be as old as the concepts they personify. Meanwhile, their brother Death is so old that he can't even remember if he preceded God himself, but is a subversion on the other end since he's more impartial about the Apocalypse and doesn't take any glee in destroying humanity.

Eve, the Mother of All Monsters, predates Angels, Humans and Demons and was implied to be related in some way to the Leviathans.

The Leviathans are ravenous primordial monsters who were the first of God's creations and predate both Angels and the invention of souls. Death explains that God sealed them away out of fear that they would "chomp the entire petri dish".

"Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey's Head" by Gorillaz from Demon Days is a Spoken Word track, read by Dennis Hopper about an ancient mountain called Monkey whom the villagers below the foot of the mountain know and fear. In the end it destroys everybody and everything.

"Night on Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky, a composition about a huge mountain where a witches sabbath takes place at night. In Fantasia this is made more clear by having the top of the mountain actually be Tchernobog the demon god, folded behind his wings, sleeping all day, but awakening at night and summoning all demons, ghosts, witches and other creepy things to appear inside the mountain for a devilish feast. It is implied that this has been going on since the dawn of time.

Mythology and Religion

Japanese Mythology: some of the Youkai are actually either animals (like the two-tailed cat or the Kitsune) or items (such as umbrellas or combs) who have lived/neglected for long enough and gains spirits of their own, and most of the time, becoming malevolent.

Other Sites

The SCP Foundation has a file on Bigfoot. The "official" version is that just seeing it causes death, but the real version is that they were a Superior Species to which humanity was enthralled in prehistoric eras, having mastered Organic Technology. Then mankind rose up against them, destroying them, and wiping their own memories of the event... but now they're coming back.

Tabletop Games

The "pre-human sentient species" thing is played up to eleven with Aboleths from Dungeons & Dragons. They are an evil species that predates creation itself. And they can life indefinitely, meaning there might be some that were still around before the creation of the multiverse.

Call of Cthulhu supplement Curse of the Chthonians, adventure "The Curse of Chaugnar Faugn". The title Cthulhu Mythos deity is stated to be at least a billion years old.

Warhammer 40,000 has no shortage of these, with the youngest Chaos god being ten thousand years old. The other three achieved sentience during the Renaissance, Middle Ages and Mesopotamian eras respectively, while the orks were created approximately sixty million years before humans existed, but the eldest entities in the universe are the C'tan.

Warhammer Fantasy has many of it's major antagonists fall under this category, with most having predated the empire and some even humanity itself. Prominent examples include the ChaosGods and their various Daemons, Malekith and Morathi, and Nagash. Then of course there are the dragon ogres,who predate even the coming of the Old Ones.

The Zendikar block of Magic: The Gathering features the Planet-EatingEldritch Abomination Eldrazi Titans as its Big Bads. Aside from the whole Planet-Eating thing, their main schtick is that, despite being living things, they are colorless, because they predate the colors of magic. For reference, In-Universe, the colors of magic are practically a law of nature; the Eldrazi are basically older than physics.

The Legend of Zelda has Ganondorf, an Evil Sorcerer who (depending on which side of the split timeline) has been sealed away for hundreds of years at a time, only to be released and either sealed again or killed. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword reveals that Ganondorf (or Ganon, as the case may be) is the corporeal form of the "curse of Demise", who is the true Ancient Evil in the series. An otherworldly being whose death in Skyward Sword laid a curse on all those who would descend from the Link and Zelda of that game (so those possessing the spirit of the Hero and the bloodline of Hylia, respectively). Ganondorf's malice towards Link, Zelda, and the kingdom of Hyrule is that debt being paid. By the time of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which takes place more than 10,000 years after the previous game, Ganon has degenerated into an Almighty Idiot that is Made of Evil, while his origins as a Gerudo man are barely remembered, with the one Gerudo character who does bring it up considering it a disgrace to her people's honor.

The Reapers of Mass Effect, massive highly advanced machines that "harvest" all space-faring civilizations every 50,000 years.

The Big Bad of the first Shadowman, Legion, is known to be so ancient that it practically made all the prophecies about its own return after it was sealed off. It also manages to gather some of history's finest serial killers under his thrall.

Lavos, an ancient being who came to Earth millions of years ago, and who (in the Original Future) will cause The End of the World as We Know It, was responsible for the death of an entire intelligent species, will consume almost all life on Earth and then send its children to other worlds to do the same (implying that it was born the same way).

Also the Rust Tyranno which had been waiting for more than 65 million years for a rematch.

The oldest evil in the Diablo universe was Tathamet, the original Prime Evil, which was destroyed by Anu, the original god of the cosmos. The Burning Hells and the demons were spawned from Tathamet's remains, and the Seven Great Evils which would threaten creation were born from each of Tathamet's seven heads, while Anu's remains would form the Crystal Arch, from which the High Heavens and the angels sprung.

Orochi has existed since the creation of the Earth, and is disgusted by humans for ruining the world, so he aimed to Kill All Humans. He was sealed by the ancestors of Kyo, Iori and Chizuru long ago. Nowadays (that is, KOF '97) he was unsealed again by the Hakkeshu (Orochi's followers) and Kyo, Iori and Chizuru have to seal him again.

There's also Those From The Past, a group of villains lead by Saiki who time-traveled from the distant past and aims to take the power of Orochi for their own purposes.

The situation is somewhat muddied in Dragon Age II, but the piece of Red Lyrium, which serves as the catalyst for the madness that engulfs Kirkwall towards the end of the game, was recovered from an ancient dwarven city so old, nobody even knew such things existed anymore.

In the Siren games, the Big Bad for the first Siren game/New Translation remake consisted of Datatsushi/Kaiko, alien beings that landed on Earth in the 600s that were responsible for the events in Hanuda while in Siren 2, Mother and Otoshigo were responsible for the events in Yamijima Island.

The Big Bad of Tales of Symphonia is revealed to be One Character With Two Aliases: Yggdrasil, the leader of the evil organization Cruxis, is actually Mithos, the legendary hero who ended the war which more or less marks the beginning of recorded history. Yuan and Kratos Aurion are also just as ancient—they were his party members back then—but significantly less evil.

The true main antagonists of the Nazi Zombies saga are revealed to be the Apothicons, a splinter race of ancient Keepers whose goal is to corrupt and destroy the universe and all its' dimensions and then devour it. They send Element 115 into each dimension in order to carve a path to an apocalypse, or send their emissary the Shadow Man to speed things along. Origins alludes to them by referring to them as this trope, and the following maps gradually build up their presence until their true role in the story is revealed in Revelations.

Web Animation

Salem, the Big Bad of RWBY has worked from the shadows for thousands of years towards her efforts of wiping out humanity and claiming the four Relics. This claim is backed by Professor Ozpin, who's fought her nearly that entire time. For failing in his first attempt to defeat her, the gods cursed him with a form of reincarnation so that he would eventually succeed.

Discord And Nightmare Moon from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Discord was an ancient being of chaos, who ruled over Equestria and made everypony's existence miserable, until Luna and Celestia were able to seal him. Nighmare Moon was Princess Luna, an Alicorn so powerful, her special talent was to move the moon, but ended up succumbing to The Corruption and became a villain who wanted to bring Eternal Night if not stopped by Celestia.

King Sombra enslaved the citizens of the Crystal Empire a thousand years ago. He was never killed, though he was turned into a Living Shadow.

The Center, the main enemy of Justice League: The New Frontier is a mix of this and Gaia's Vengeance, as it has made several attempts to stop man's evolutionary progress after they managed to evolve to a point that they could pose a serious threat to the Earth.

Aku from Samurai Jack. In one episode which showed his Back Story, he is shown fighting Jack's world's gods before the world began. This was aeons before he gained sentience and was instead just a mindless Eldritch Abomination.

In Thunder Cats, Mumm-Ra calls upon the "Ancient Spirits of Evil" to give him power to transform.

Mr. Burns on The Simpsons can be one Depending on the Writer. Usually he's only 104 years old, but one throwaway gag had his age as an unspecified 4-digit numbernote To be fair, he might just use a 0 for the first digit, and another revealed that he was born in Pangaea, making him over 200 million years old.

Jimmy Two-Shoes: All the Heinouses, apart from Beezy. In one episode, Jimmy asks Lucius Heinous VII, the youngest of them, how long it took him to grow his horns. Lucius answers that it took 400 years. And in another episode, when Lucius is made fun of for his age, he defends himself by saying he's "just barely seven hundred".

Ice King is over a thousand years old. He's more insane than actually evil, though.

The Lich dates back at least to The Great Mushroom War which happened a millennium prior to the series. "Evergreen" implies that he's over 65 million years old, and "Gold Stars" reveals that he predates non-existence (or at least is old enough to know of beings that did).

"Orgalorg" reveals that The Ice King's pet penguin Gunther is actually an evil god named Orgalorg. How old he is is unspecified, but at the time of his banishment, Earth was still an inhospitable planet.

Tarakudo, Lord of all Oni and King of all Shadowkhan, ravaged the ancient Japan with his nine Oni generals who each commanded a vast Shadowkhan army, until they were imprisoned in Oni Masks and/or separate dimensions. This evil faction is implied to be older than the Demon Sorcerers are, given the fact that Shendu controlled one of the Shadowkhan armies through one of the Oni Masks in his statue form.

The Bloodwolf of The Adventures of Puss in Boots is a being summoned from the Netherworld that describes himself as being the source of all fear and older than the world.

Real Life

Proposals for the message meant to be sent to future generations who might stumble upon nuclear waste sites thousands of years in the future draw heavily on this trope.

Community

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